“A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner,” so says an English proverb.
Some analysts predict that the U.S. business scene will look significantly different after this economic crisis. After navigating through some very turbulent times and great uncertainties, many might agree, we will eventually change how we do business.
How about your business? Are rough and unpredictable times forcing you to examine your organizational processes, services and products? How about your employees? How do they coordinate their activities with one another? Most importantly, do you think your organization is doing what it should in terms of developing, maintaining and strengthening or improving customer/client relationships?
If not, you may want to consider an organizational diagnosis as a way to closely examine what is going on in your business versus what should be going on. Now more than ever, business can little afford to have uncoordinated or redundant processes and ‘live in the moment’ attitudes.
Above all, we know that the stronger and more competitive businesses are also those that develop strong relationships with their employees. These businesses place a high priority on involving and engaging employees in purposeful ways; they, for example, will encourage and recognize problem-solvers and innovative thinkers.
If you want to lead your business out of the blues and doldrums to where you think it should be, during good or bad times, here are my suggestions for doing that:
- After you have successfully engaged and involved your employees, you will focus on collecting data. Your actions should reflect an attitude of confronting reality head on. This data will reveal what is going on today. You will use this data to determine what is working and what is not working.
- Once you have collected your data, then you will start to assess that data. You will ask probing questions. What are the positive trends; what are the negative trends? Is it flat here? Are things working for the better, or have we always done things this way? What is the current status of ‘xyz?’
- After assessing your data, then you can begin to develop organizational improvements and act upon them. It’s at this point that you really involve the employees by assigning them to certain teams or committees. Those are the stakeholders in creating improvements. These teams will act on some of those improvement recommendations; they will put them into play and test them out. By applying these methods, you will then be ready to take the fourth step, which is evaluation.
- You will then evaluate what was tested and what was learned to see if you can make incremental improvements. What worked? What didn’t work? What will we need to change? What do we want to keep? What missed the mark and why? Do we want to try that again?
As I see it, then, America’s most success-driven business leaders are now gaining momentum, and they will be the ones who apply critical thinking techniques to break free of any unproductive habits.
In the final HRTools.com Insight of this series, I will share a real-life organizational diagnosis success story.